3D trip around the body

It sounds like the stuff of science-fiction: a three-dimensional voyage through flesh-and-blood anatomy. Thanks to ground-breaking technology, it is possible at the UNSW Galleries.

In an exhibition that skirts the boundary between art and science, visitors can use gaming devices – an X-Box controller and a virtual-reality headset – to navigate the body's super-highway, the aorta, sourced from real patient data.

John McGhee with his visual tours through the human body as part of an exhibition at the UNSW Galleries in Paddington.Credit:Steven Siewert

Faux, the director of rehabilitation and pain medicine at St Vincent's Hospital, is working with John McGhee, the director of the new 3D Visualisation Aesthetics Lab at the University of New South Wales. They hope to merge the worlds of art and design and healthcare in a bid to enhance patient communication.

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The aim is to communicate complex data from MRI and CT scans into visual renderings which will help patients to better understand their illnesses or injuries. The hope is that the striking and dramatic images of the causes and effects of illness and recovery could give help patients feel more engaged with their bodies and assist in the rehabilitation process.

The work is in the very early stages. McGhee, a CGI artist, moved to UNSW from the University of Dundee in November to set up the lab.

"A lot of people don't really understand how the brain works," Faux says. "Trying to communicate really complex ideas of networks and synapses in the brain is usually really difficult, so using 3D visualisation allows people to actually imagine how things might be going on in their brain, how things might be repairing themselves and how the brain responds to damage."

In Fantastic Voyage, a US crew, including Welch, are microscopically minaturised in order to travel on a submarine into the body of a Soviet scientist in a bid to save him from a deadly blood clot. At UNSW Galleries, the voyage is immersive, though not quite so literally. Visitors can virtually navigate the greyish labyrinth of the vascular system. A swirling mass of red platelets career past, while headphones transmit gurgling underwater sounds, mixed with the pumping of a heart. Move close to the artery walls, and minute threads of blood vessels can be spotlighted by a virtual torch controlled by the user. It is like a mining exploration through an extra-terrestrial world.

"It's sci-fi becomes sci-fact," McGhee says. "These cinematic experiences that we all have and see in popular in culture, they do impact on what we do with science and technology."

McGhee's own journey began in television commercials and multimedia. He was working with a drug company when he became interested in the idea of using real medical data to build animations. He moved into academia to explore this idea and completed a PhD in 2009. He opened his thesis with a reference to Innerspace, a 1987 comedy starring Dennis Quaid, Meg Ryan and Martin Short, which borrowed its central premise from Fantastic Voyage.

"It sounds almost quite frivolous and naive," McGhee says, "but these cinematic references are hugely important when you do new design work ... If you look back at things like 2001: A Space Odyssey or Blade Runner, things that happen in these films that we dream, become reality.

"In art and design, we do this all the time. We try and brainstorm the most extreme thing we could possibly do with a design and then reference it against user groups and realise, actually, it's not that crazy."

McGhee is excited about crossing the streams of art and design with clinical care, to provide a link between scientific data and the human experience. He points to pioneers of the past who found new ways to look at the human body. During the Renaissance, for instance, Andreas Vesalius produced a chilling etching of corpse mourning its own death in a landscape.

"That sounds really odd," McGhee says. "Why would you show medics a corpse in a landscape? That was a functional piece to explain to health professionals how different parts of the body looked and worked, but it was also explaining meaning about death, mortality and how we feel about that process."

The work undertaken so far - which also includes renderings of kidneys and the blood vessels going into the brain - will be exhibited in the hope of gaining support for more research and larger-scale studies.

"Artists and designers have been doing this for a long time," McGhee says. "We've been taking the complexities of the world and turning them into something people can have an experience with."